I agree that there are possibly too many blown highlights; certainly in the first - in the second and third I can still see detail in 90%+ of the image which is ok for me

The problem here is that many oriental Asian women prefer to look as light as possible (and will spend relative fortunes on creams etc to make their skin whiter), and so I've probably gone a little OTT in lightening the image. When adjusting the image I was concentrating mainly on my partner, afterall it was her day

Without suffering an earbashing from her (and making the image darker, in turn her too), do you have any idea on how to counter this?

Use levels only to set your white and black points; I have levels set to clip .01% of black and white. This gives you maximum contract with minimal clipping; only a few pixels are actually clipped, so you don't lose highlight or shadow detail. Then use curves to set overall image luminosity; as long as you don't mess with the ends of the curve, you can do anything you want to the middle within reason without clipping. Then I use midtone-masked local contrast enhancement and sharpening to "punch up" the image further, again without losing shadow or highlight detail.